Monday, October 3, 2011

Top-Secret Reformers!

The DOE has only a handful of staffers who oversee charter schools and it can’t carefully review every application it gets on its own. This year, a record 58 candidates sought to open charters.

So to help with the painstaking selection effort, the state enlisted more than a dozen unpaid volunteers, experts on charters and education who reviewed the applications and gave recommendations. Ultimately, the DOE made the final decision and approved 23 of those schools.

That’s a good idea — not because there’s evidence of anything objectionable, but because the public has a right to know. It will protect the integrity of the very necessary job these screeners are doing. And it’s just one more way of ensuring that the very best charter schools are chosen.

The DOE doesn’t want to release the names, saying volunteers have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." But that’s not justification enough. The screeners are performing a public job, and any charters chosen for the wrong reasons would hurt the growth of good ones.

Gov. Chris Christie said today he will not tell a group that is advertising and promoting his reform policies in some states to disclose their funding.

“It’s up to them,” he said at a press conference on Tuesday. “It’s their group…I have nothing to do with the group. If they are out there helping me, I say thank you very much.”

The group, Committee for Our Children's Future (CCF), a 501(c)(4) organization, said on Tuesday it launched a $1.5 million cable TV ad campaign in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia to promote the reform measures Christie has been pushing.